We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome

DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon 2 considerably expands the world introduced in the first film, and that expansion includes a significant new presence: Valka, the long-lost mother of dragon-riding protagonist Hiccup, voiced by Cate Blanchett. The film devotes much of its sweet, sensitive middle act to introducing her, and building her up into a complicated, nuanced character. She’s mysterious and formidable, capable of taking Hiccup and his dragon partner Toothless out of the sky with casual ease. She’s knowledgable: Two decades of studying dragons means she knows Toothless’ anatomy better than he does. She’s wise. She’s principled. She’s joyous. She’s divided. She’s damaged. She’s vulnerable. She’s something female characters so often aren’t in action/adventure films with male protagonists: She’s interesting.

Too bad the story gives her absolutely nothing to do.

There’s been a cultural push going on for years now to get female characters in mainstream films some agency, self-respect, confidence, and capability, to make them more than the cringing victims and eventual trophies of 1980s action films, or the grunting, glowering, sexless-yet-sexualized types that followed, modeled on the groundbreaking badass Vasquez in Aliens. The idea of the Strong Female Character—someone with her own identity, agenda, and story purpose—has thoroughly pervaded the conversation about what’s wrong with the way women are often perceived and portrayed today, in comics, videogames, and film especially. Sophia McDougall has intelligently dissected and dismissed the phrase, and artists Kate Beaton, Carly Monardo, Meredith Gran have hilariously lampooned what it often becomes in comics. “Strong Female Character” is just as often used derisively as descriptively, because it’s such a simplistic, low bar to vault, and it’s more a marketing term than a meaningful goal. But just as it remains frustratingly uncommon for films to pass the simple, low-bar Bechdel Test, it’s still rare to see films in the mainstream action/horror/science-fiction/fantasy realm introduce women with any kind of meaningful strength, or women who go past a few simple stereotypes.

And even when they do, the writers often seem lost after that point. Bringing in a Strong Female Character™ isn’t actually a feminist statement, or an inclusionary statement, or even a basic equality statement, if the character doesn’t have any reason to be in the story except to let filmmakers point at her on the poster and say “See? This film totally respects strong women!”

Valka is just the latest example of the Superfluous, Flimsy Character disguised as a Strong Female Character. And possibly she’s the most depressing, considering Dragon 2’s other fine qualities, and considering how impressive she is in the abstract. The film spends so much time on making her first awe-inducing, then sympathetic, and just a little heartbreakingly pathetic in her isolation and awkwardness at meeting another human being. But once the introductions are finally done, and the battle starts, she immediately becomes useless, both to the rest of the cast and to the rapidly moving narrative. She faces the villain (the villain she’s apparently been successfully resisting alone for years!) and she’s instantly, summarily defeated. Her husband and son utterly overshadow her; they need to rescue her twice in maybe five minutes. Her biggest contribution to the narrative is in giving Hiccup a brief, rote “You are the Chosen One” pep talk. Then she all but disappears from the film, raising the question of why the story spent so much time on her in the first place. It may be because writer-director Dean DeBlois originally planned for her to be the film’s villain, then discarded that idea in later drafts. But those later drafts give her the setup of a complicated antagonist… and the resolution of no one at all. (Meanwhile, the actual villain gets virtually no backstory—which is fine, in a way—but it leaves the film unbalanced.)

And Valka’s type—the Strong Female Character With Nothing To Do—is becoming more and more common. The Lego Movie is the year’s other most egregious and frustrating example. It introduces its female lead, Elizabeth Banks’ Wyldstyle, as a beautiful, super-powered, super-smart, ultra-confident heroine who’s appalled by how dumb and hapless protagonist Emmet is. Then the rest of the movie laughs at her and marginalizes her as she turns into a sullen, disapproving nag and a wet blanket. One joke has Emmet tuning her out entirely when she tries to catch him up on her group’s fate-of-the-world struggle; he replaces her words with “Blah blah blah, I’m so pretty.” Her only post-introduction story purpose is to be rescued, repeatedly, and to eventually confer the cool-girl approval that seals Emmet’s transformation from loser to winner. After a terrific story and a powerful ending, the movie undermines its triumph with a tag where WyldStyle actually turns to her current boyfriend for permission to dump him so she can give herself to Emmet as a reward for his success. For the ordinary dude to be triumphant, the Strong Female Character has to entirely disappear into Subservient Trophy Character mode. This is Trinity Syndrome à la The Matrix: the hugely capable woman who never once becomes as independent, significant, and exciting as she is in her introductory scene. (Director Chris McKay sorta-acknowledged the problem in a DailyMail interview presented as “The Lego Moviefilmmaker promises more ‘strong females’ in the sequel,” though his actual quotes do nothing of the sort.)

by Tasha Robinson, The Dissolve |  Read more:

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Dear Daughter, Your Mom

Your mom walks into Hooters. She’s wearing the famous spandex uniform. She’s 19. In her wallet is a Mensa membership card, which she knows is distasteful and wouldn’t show a soul but carries to remind herself that she knows a thing or two—a point that’s easy to forget and harder to share in necks of certain woods. When she’s a little older she’ll consider the ironic elements of the costume: The tank top’s wide-eyed owl, symbol of wisdom she’s possessed since birth, stretched across round breasts she herself sometimes admires; the nylon shorts’ neon hue, “safety orange” as the hunting garb she sometimes wore around the family farm to keep from getting shot. But right now she’s thinking about her body. Does it look good?

“What do you think, Billy?” the skinny manager, Bones, says to the squat, wolfish assistant manager. They’re both looking at her crotch. (The two men are also roommates, and Bones just handily won a debate about pubic hairs on bars of soap. Billy: “Soap cleans itself.” Bones: “You’re an idiot, Billy.”)

“Turn around,” Billy tells your mom. Her heart races as she pivots awkwardly on her white high-tops. “Shorts are too big.”

“What?” she says, playing dumb. She’s five foot three. She knew the smallest available uniform size would be required to achieve protocol, but she gave it a shot—not because she wouldn’t be seen in shorts shorter than her ass but because she’s genuinely worried about how her ass looks.

“They’re too big. You need the smallest size,” Billy says, rubbing his hand along his short black beard.

“I don’t think so,” your mom says, her voice firm. Her hair is blonde, as in any good joke. “These are good.”

“Maybe she’s right,” Bones says, looking your mom in the eye.

But Billy orders her to put on smaller shorts. She smiles on her way to the backroom so as to not seem difficult or defeated. Your mom is here to make however much money a “Hooters Girl” might make without flirting or tolerating abuse. She’s tired and unimpressed and knows that plenty of jobs are worse than this one.

Your mom’s previous summer job involved weighing wheat trucks, wearing a hard hat, and hauling feed sacks into the volatile mill of a rural grain elevator just after an elevator down the road exploded and killed seven people. When she was a child, her carpenter dad took a second job transporting industrial chemicals and, after fumes leaked into the cab of the truck, foamed at the mouth in an emergency room. Her uncle died when his tractor slid off a muddy bridge and pinned him to a creek bed. Her great-grandma was raped while closing a small Wichita hamburger stand. Her grandma chased and counseled felons as a cop and probation officer (but was shot at home by an ex-husband with her own gun). Your mom’s mom spent many summers under a hot tent (with your tiny mom), in a field whose stubble was sometimes on fire, unloading and peddling Chinese fireworks that are now illegal. There were many other dangerous jobs, homes, and men. Taking all this into account, your mom—the accidental daughter of a very smart and rightfully angry teenager—decided early to do things differently than everyone around her. That meant she would not drink, smoke, have sex, or get any grade but an A until she had a job and a home where she was safe.

by Sarah Smarsh, TMN |  Read more:

Image: Tim Samoff

If the World Began Again, Would Life as We Know It Exist?

In less than five milliseconds, a Hydromantes salamander can launch its tongue—including the muscles, cartilage, and part of its skeleton—out of its mouth to snag a hapless insect mid-flight. Among amphibians, it is the quick draw champ. Frogs and chameleons are comparative slowpokes when it comes to their ballistic anatomies. “I’ve spent maybe 50 years studying the evolution of tongues in salamanders,” says David Wake, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, “this is a particularly interesting case because salamanders, who don’t do anything fast, have the fastest vertebrate movement I’m aware of.” Within their lineage, evolution found a better way to accomplish tongue-hunting. Their seemingly unique adaptation appears to have evolved independently in three other unrelated salamander species. It is a case of convergent evolution—where different species separately developed similar biological adaptations when faced with the same environmental pressures. Salamanders are Wake’s go-to example when asked a decades-old question in evolutionary biology: If you could replay the “tape of life” would evolution repeat itself? In the salamanders, it appears it has: In other organisms, it may not have.

This question was famously posed by the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his 1989 book, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, which was published at a time when people still listened to music recorded on cassette tapes. The book discussed fossils left behind by myriad strange animals that inhabited the Earth’s oceans about 520 million years ago during the Cambrian period, and were preserved in the Burgess Shale. Nearly all animals alive today can trace their lineages back to the creatures that lived in the Cambrian, but not every animal that lived in the Cambrian period has descendants that live today. Many Cambrian species have since died out because they weren’t fit enough to compete, or because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time during volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, or other extinction events.

Gould saw the incredible diversity of the Burgess animals and theorized that life today would have been different had history unfurled in another way. Random mutations and chance extinctions—events Gould called “historical contingencies”—would build on each other, he suggested, driving the evolution of life down one path or another. In Gould’s view, the existence of every animal, including humans, was a rare event that would have been unlikely to re-occur if the tape of life were rewound to the Cambrian period and played again. One of the paleontologists—Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University—whose work on the Burgess fossils was heavily cited by Gould in his book, strongly disagrees with this viewpoint.

Conway Morris believes that, over time, natural selection leads organisms to evolve a limited number of adaptations to the finite number of ecological niches on Earth. This causes unrelated organisms to gradually converge on similar body designs. “Organisms have to configure themselves to the realities of the physical, chemical, and also biological world,” he says. In Conway Morris’s view, these constraints make it all but inevitable that if the tape of life were replayed, evolution would eventually reproduce organisms similar to what we have today. If humans’ ape ancestors had not evolved big brains and the intelligence that goes with them, he believes that another branch of animals, such as dolphins or crows, might have, and filled the niche that we now occupy. Gould disagreed.

Both scholars recognized that convergence and contingency exist in evolution. Their debate instead revolved around how repeatable or unique key adaptations, like human intelligence, are. Meanwhile, other biologists have taken up the puzzle, and shown how convergence and contingency interact. Understanding the interplay of these two forces could reveal whether every living thing is the result of a several-billion-year-long chain of lucky chances, or whether we all—salamanders and humans alike—are as inevitable as death and taxes.

Rather than attempt to reconstruct history with fossils, Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University, decided to watch convergence and contingency unfold in real time, in the controlled environment of his laboratory. In 1988, he separated a single population of Escherichia coli bacteria into 12 separate flasks containing liquid nutrients, and let them each evolve separately. Every few months for the past 26 years, he or one of his students has frozen a sample of the bacteria. This archive of frozen microbes gives Lenski the ability to replay E. coli’s tape of life from any point he wishes, simply by thawing out the samples. Along the way, he can examine how the bacteria change both genetically and in ways that are visible under a microscope. Lenski says, “The whole experiment was set up to test how reproducible evolution was.”

by Zach Zorich, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Zender 

Small Ads

We are now surrounded on all sides by small ads. For the time being, we reassure ourselves not so much with their tininess, but with their inaccurate aim. My affection for Tottenham Hotspur—the English soccer team—means that omniscient Gmail sends me endless ads about bone spurs. On Facebook, I take some cheap shots at Sarah Palin and the multibillion-dollar, publicly traded behemoth decides I’d like to see . . . ads promoting Mitt Romney. Missed again, you corporate motherfuckers! says the little voice inside my head. Your marketing will never catch me! Of course, it eventually will. It already kind of does. A fleeting invitation to a gout study somehow snares me. Did I post something fatty? Meanwhile, in the paper-bound world, a different kind of targeting is winding down its long tradition, offering unique pleasures which I am only just starting to savor—both because the internet has taught me things and because I fear these other, less-appreciated tiny ads will soon disappear forever. So there you are, on a Sunday with your coffee reading Harper’s, or Bookforum, or the New Yorker, and after a series of carefully orchestrated, full-page ads that either flatter your interests (Why yes, I am curious about Bolaño!) or accede quietly to their evolution (Enough with the Žižek, already!)—you come across something altogether different. Their size congratulates your sense of discovery.

At first you think these little rectangles are amusing because they offer monogrammed sweaters and self-publishing opportunities—things that are undoubtedly funny, in a sad, Skymall sort of way. But sometimes the funny sadness goes deeper than that, like the sadness of “unique diamond fish jewelry” for $15,000. And then sometimes you are plunged so deep into these ads, you wish there was a German word, or school of social thought, that could sufficiently describe the experience. Behold, the right-hand column of page 77 in April 30th’s New Yorker. Here we blatantly have bedroom adventure gear right next to farming teens, and then two ads for posh rehabilitation. The first rehab offers an “elegantly appointed environment” directed, you would have to say, at old money. The second one is secondchancesforteens.com. Above these ads are ones for pearl puddles, “not your father’s safari jacket,” more blazers (this time from Hunter and Coggins), and more treatment—unparalleled treatment, even—for “co-occurring disorders.” We know that this co-occurring combination has not been created by some wacky inhuman algorithm that has no idea about homonyms and the like. The New Yorker doesn’t have a masthead, but I think we can assume their layout is overseen by humans. Neither is this the result of failing public education systems, or the decline of print media, or even the oft-referenced ignorance of the “flyover” states. Ladies and gentlemen, this is straight from the pages of the New Yorker. The weird thing—you realize, flipping skeptically back to the other pages—is how all the carefully placed (and you thought, “understated”) doodles have actually been leading up to this bizarre Upper East Side marketing orgy. You’re following some cute glyph about smoking, then one about stationery, then dirty dishes and some mischievous cat—then it’s suddenly “Not your father’s safari jacket” followed by pearl puddles, LIBERATOR dildos, Quaker teens, rehab, troubled teens, and more jackets. It’s like a mini-Buñuel movie! And they expect you to keep following along with Malcolm Gladwell, or whoever it is, over there to the left? Why would you? You want to shout, Hey Malcolm, can you shut up about Twitter and explain the neo-surrealist montage unfolding perversely in the margins? Hard to picture one person with these particular needs, but let’s have another look. Taken in order, it could definitely be that the guy gets out of rehab at Fernside—you picture him hiking through the ferns, there at his side—wearing not his father’s safari jacket, and maybe the pearl puddle earrings (a gift) are in his pocket, along with some (discreetly packaged) LIBERATOR gear; he happens, on his way west, to visit the farming teens—who don’t really look 15 to 17, it should be pointed out—then one woodsy thing leads to another and he’s right back in rehab; fortunately this time he’s “in an elegantly appointed environment,” and the poor organic teen, for her part, goes to secondchancesforteens.com (nearby, but also far enough away, “in the Catskills”); at this point, we lose track of her, but our New Yorker–subscribing protagonist, when he gets out, prudently opts for a more conservative, non-safari type jacket, from Hunter and Coggins, in Asheville, “which were $195, now $165.” Nice choice, you’d have to say, given all that’s happened. But it’s madness to read those ads like that.

by Dushko Petrovich, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

W. Tucker, up
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Rhynchostylis gigantea epiphytic orchids growing wild in altitude of 350 meters, India-Thailand.
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New Yorker
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Fog Catchers Bring Water to Parched Villages, Photo: Anne Lummerich
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Why Are We Importing Our Own Fish?

In 1982 a Chinese aquaculture scientist named Fusui Zhang journeyed to Martha’s Vineyard in search of scallops. The New England bay scallop had recently been domesticated, and Dr. Zhang thought the Vineyard-grown shellfish might do well in China. After a visit to Lagoon Pond in Tisbury, he boxed up 120 scallops and spirited them away to his lab in Qingdao. During the journey 94 died. But 26 thrived. Thanks to them, today China now grows millions of dollars of New England bay scallops, a significant portion of which are exported back to the United States.

As go scallops, so goes the nation. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, even though the United States controls more ocean than any other country, 86 percent of the seafood we consume is imported.

But it’s much fishier than that: While a majority of the seafood Americans eat is foreign, a third of what Americans catch is sold to foreigners.

The seafood industry, it turns out, is a great example of the swaps, delete-and-replace maneuvers and other mechanisms that define so much of the outsourced American economy; you can find similar, seemingly inefficient phenomena in everything from textiles to technology. The difference with seafood, though, is that we’re talking about the destruction and outsourcing of the very ecological infrastructure that underpins the health of our coasts. Let’s walk through these illogical arrangements, course by course.

Appetizers: Half Shells for Cocktails

Our most blatant seafood swap has been the abandonment of local American oysters for imported Asian shrimp. Once upon a time, most American Atlantic estuaries (including the estuary we now call the New York Bight) had vast reefs of wild oysters. Many of these we destroyed by the 1800s through overharvesting. But because oysters are so easy to cultivate (they live off wild microalgae that they filter from the water), a primitive form of oyster aquaculture arose up and down our Atlantic coast.

Until the 1920s the United States produced two billion pounds of oysters a year. The power of the oyster industry, however, was no match for the urban sewage and industrial dumps of various chemical stews that pummeled the coast at midcentury. Atlantic oyster culture fell to just 1 percent of its historical capacity by 1970.

Just as the half-shell appetizer was fading into obscurity, the shrimp cocktail rose to replace it, thanks to a Japanese scientist named Motosaku Fujinaga and the kuruma prawn. Kurumas were favored in a preparation known as “dancing shrimp,” a dish that involved the consumption of a wiggling wild shrimp dipped in sake. Dr. Fujinaga figured out how to domesticate this pricey animal. His graduate students then fanned out across Asia and tamed other varieties of shrimp.

Today shrimp, mostly farmed in Asia, is the most consumed seafood in the United States: Americans eat nearly as much of it as the next two most popular seafoods (canned tuna and salmon) combined. Notably, the amount of shrimp we now eat is equivalent to our per capita oyster consumption a century ago.

And the Asian aquaculture juggernaut didn’t stop with shrimp. In fact, shrimp was a doorway into another seafood swap, which leads to the next course.  (...)

Lox: Wild for Farmed

There was a time when “nova lox” was exactly that: wild Atlantic salmon (laks in Norwegian) caught off Nova Scotia or elsewhere in the North Atlantic. But most wild Atlantic salmon populations have been fished to commercial extinction, and today a majority of our lox comes from selectively bred farmed salmon, with Chile our largest supplier.

This is curious, given that salmon are not native to the Southern Hemisphere. But after Norwegian aquaculture companies took them there in the ’80s, they became so numerous as to be considered an invasive species.

The prevalence of imported farmed salmon on our bagels is doubly curious because the United States possesses all the wild salmon it could possibly need. Five species of Pacific salmon return to Alaskan rivers every year, generating several hundred million pounds of fish flesh every year. Where does it all go?

Again, abroad. Increasingly to Asia. Alaska, by far our biggest fish-producing state, exports around three-quarters of its salmon.

To make things triply strange, a portion of that salmon, after heading across the Pacific, returns to us: Because foreign labor is so cheap, many Alaskan salmon are caught in American waters, frozen, defrosted in Asia, filleted and boned, refrozen and sent back to us. Pollock also make this Asian round trip, as do squid — and who knows what else?

by Paul Greenberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Hu Sheyou/Xinhua Press, via Corbis

Yo

Yo.

It seems so simple. So mindless. It’s only slightly less boring than “Hey” or “Hi,” if only because of some perceived aggression or excitement attached to it. But Yo is anything but simple.

If you haven’t been following along on Twitter, Yo is the hottest new app that will leave you scratching your head. The entire premise of the app is to send other users a single word: Yo.

Yo currently has over 50,000 active users, after launching as a joke on April Fools’ Day. Users have sent over 4 million Yo’s to each other. Without ever having officially launched, co-founder and CEO Or Arbel managed to secure $1.2 million in funding from a list of unnamed investors, except for co-founder, angel, and Mobli CEO Moshe Hogeg, who participated in the round.

It might have started out as a joke, but the app has turned into something more universally enjoyable, and its brief popularity tells us something bigger about where the mobile social landscape is headed. We’re seeing the death of digital dualism play out before us, with apps focused on merging the physical and digital worlds. Snapchat has ephemerality. Whisper and Secret have anonymity.

And Yo has context.

Context > Content

Let’s back up for a second.

You’re at a bar with your best friend and a love interest. Both put a hand on your shoulder when they talk to you. From the outside, it all looks the same. But there’s a big difference between the comfortable touch of a close friend and the explorative graze of someone you may very well have sex with soon.

The next morning, your friend and your crush send you the exact same text. It says simply “Hey.” From your old pal, “hey” just means hey. But from your sexy friend, “hey” can mean anything from “last night was fun” to “I’m still thinking about you this morning.”

As with anything, a “Yo” can just be a yo. But you’ll feel a very real difference between a “Yo” you get in the morning from a friend and a “Yo” you get at 2 a.m. from a friend with benefits. Trust me.

And that’s… supposedly… the magic.

The context of the Yo says much more than two little letters. And this is more important than it sounds.

by Jordan Cook, TechCrunch |  Read more:

Image: Yo

Michelle Wie Wins First Major At U.S. Open

[ed. Finally! It'll be interesting to see how her career progresses after this. She's already the top money winner on the LPGA tour this year, and, at only 24, (... seems like she's been around forever) she could fulfill the potential that everyone has seen for years. See also: here and here]

Michelle Wie finally delivered a performance worthy of the hype that has been heaped on her since she was a teenager.

Wie bounced back from a late mistake at Pinehurst No. 2 to bury a 25-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole, sending the 24-year-old from Hawaii to her first major championship Sunday, a two-shot victory over Stacy Lewis in the U.S. Women's Open.

Wie closed with an even-par 70 and covered her mouth with her hand before thrusting both arms in the air.

Lewis, the No. 1 player in women's golf, made her work for it. She made eight birdies to match the best score of the tournament with a 66, and then was on the practice range preparing for a playoff when her caddie told her Wie had made the sharp-breaking birdie putt on the 17th.

Lewis returned to the 18th green to hug the winner after other players doused Wie with champagne.

What a journey for Wie, who now has four career victories -- all in North America, the first on the U.S. mainland -- and moved to the top of the LPGA money list after winning the biggest event in women's golf.

She has been one of the biggest stars in women's golf since she was 13 and played in the final group of a major. Her popularity soared along with criticism when she competed against the men on the PGA Tour while still in high school and talked about wanting to play in the Masters.

That seems like a lifetime ago. The 6-foot Wie is all grown up, a Stanford graduate, popular among pros of both genders and now a major champion.

"Oh my God, I can't believe this is happening," Wie said.

It almost didn't. Just like so much of her life, the path included a sharp twist no one saw coming. Wie started the final round tied with Amy Yang, took the lead when Yang made double bogey on No. 2 and didn't let anyone catch her the rest of the day.

In trouble on the tough fourth hole, she got up-and-down from 135 yards with a shot into 3 feet. Right when Lewis was making a big run, Wie answered by ripping a drive on the shortened par-5 10th and hitting a cut 8-iron into 10 feet for eagle and a four-shot lead.

She had not made a bogey since the first hole -- and then it all nearly unraveled.

From a fairway bunker on the 16th, holding a three-shot lead, she stayed aggressive and hit hybrid from the sand. After a three-minute search, the ball was found in a wiregrass bush that caused her to take a penalty drop behind her in the fairway. She chipped on to about 35 feet and rapped her bogey putt 5 feet past the hole.

Miss it and she would be tied.

Bent over in that table-top putting stance, she poured it in to avoid her first three-putt of the week. Smiling as she left the green, even though her lead was down to one, Wie hit 8-iron safely on the 17th green and holed the tough birdie putt. She pumped her fist, then slammed it twice in succession, a determination rarely seen when she was contending for majors nearly a decade ago as a teen prodigy.

"Obviously, there are moments of doubt in there," Wie said. "But obviously, I had so many people surrounding me. They never lost faith in me. That's pushed me forward."

Wie finished at 2-under 278, the only player to beat par in the second week of championship golf at Pinehurst. Martin Kaymer won by eight shots last week at 9-under 271, the second-lowest score in U.S. Open history.

by Doug Ferguson, AP/Honolulu Star Advertiser |  Read more:

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Hand-Made, Stecher Litho. Co. James Grape
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Chill Bear

[ed. One reason why McNeil State Game Sanctuary is so popular.]

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New Open-source Router Firmware Opens Your Wi-Fi Network to Strangers

We’ve often heard security folks explain their belief that one of the best ways to protect Web privacy and security on one's home turf is to lock down one's private Wi-Fi network with a strong password. But a coalition of advocacy organizations is calling such conventional wisdom into question.

Members of the “Open Wireless Movement,” including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Press, Mozilla, and Fight for the Future are advocating that we open up our Wi-Fi private networks (or at least a small slice of our available bandwidth) to strangers. They claim that such a random act of kindness can actually make us safer online while simultaneously facilitating a better allocation of finite broadband resources.

The OpenWireless.org website explains the group’s initiative. “We are aiming to build technologies that would make it easy for Internet subscribers to portion off their wireless networks for guests and the public while maintaining security, protecting privacy, and preserving quality of access," its mission statement reads. "And we are working to debunk myths (and confront truths) about open wireless while creating technologies and legal precedent to ensure it is safe, private, and legal to open your network.”

One such technology, which EFF plans to unveil at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE X) conferencenext month, is open-sourced router firmware called Open Wireless Router. This firmware would enable individuals to share a portion of their Wi-Fi networks with anyone nearby, password-free, as Adi Kamdar, an EFF activist, told Ars on Friday.

Home network sharing tools are not new, and the EFF has been touting the benefits of open-sourcing Web connections for years, but Kamdar believes this new tool marks the second phase in the open wireless initiative. Unlike previous tools, he claims, EFF’s software will be free for all, will not require any sort of registration, and will actually make surfing the Web safer and more efficient.

Open Wi-Fi initiative members have argued that the act of providing wireless networks to others is a form of “basic politeness… like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea” to a neighbor, as security expert Bruce Schneier described it.

Walled off

Kamdar said that the new firmware utilizes smart technologies that prioritize the network owner's traffic over others', so good samaritans won't have to wait for Netflix to load because of strangers using their home networks. What's more, he said, "every connection is walled off from all other connections," so as to decrease the risk of unwanted snooping.

Additionally, EFF hopes that opening one’s Wi-Fi network will, in the long run, make it more difficult to tie an IP address to an individual.

“From a legal perspective, we have been trying to tackle this idea that law enforcement and certain bad plaintiffs have been pushing, that your IP address is tied to your identity. Your identity is not your IP address. You shouldn't be targeted by a copyright troll just because they know your IP address," said Kamdar.

by Joe Silver, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

More Punk, Less Hell

When the ballots had been counted, the Prime Minister of Iceland declared the result a "shock"

The same sense of shock was felt by almost everyone. The old guard, because it had lost. And the new party, because it had won.

There had never been such a result – not in Iceland or anywhere else. Reykjavik had long been a bastion of the conservatives. That was now history. With 34.7% of the vote, the city had voted a new party into power: the anarcho-surrealists.

The leading candidate, Jón Gnarr, a comedian by profession, entered the riotous hall full of drunken anarchists looking rather circumspect. Almost shyly, he raised his fist and said: 'Welcome to the revolution!' And: "Hurray for all kinds of things!"

Gnarr was now the mayor of Reykjavik. After the Prime Minister, he held the second-most important office in the land. A third of all Icelanders live in the capital and another third commute to work there. The city is the country’s largest employer and its mayor the boss of some 8,000 civil servants.

No wonder the result was such a shock. Reykjavik was beset by crises: the crash of the banking system had also brought everything else to the verge of bankruptcy – the country, the city, companies and inhabitants. And the anarcho-surrealist party – the self-appointed Best Party – was composed largely of rock stars, mainly former punks. Not one of them had ever been part of any political body. Their slogan for overcoming the crisis was simple: "More punk, less hell!"

What were the conservative voters of Reykjavik thinking? On May 27, 2010, they did something that people usually only talk about: they took power out of the hands of politicians and gave it to amateurs.

And so began a unique political experiment. How would the anti-politicians govern? Like punks? Like anarchists? In the midst of a crisis?

"It was group sex"

A glance at the most important campaign promises of the Best Party is more than enough to highlight the audacity of Reykjavik’s voters. They were promised free towels at swimming pools, a polar bear for the zoo, the import of Jews, "so that someone who understands something about economics finally comes to Iceland", a drug-free parliament by 2020, inaction ("we’ve worked hard all our lives and want to take a well-paid four-year break now"), Disneyland with free weekly passes for the unemployed ("where they can have themselves photographed with Goofy"), greater understanding for the rural population ("every Icelandic farmer should be able to take a sheep to a hotel for free"), free bus tickets. And all this with the caveat: "We can promise more than any other party because we will break every campaign promise."

by Constantin Seibt, Tages Anzeiger | Read more:
Image: Halldor Kolbeins

Blake Edwards directing The Pink Panther (1963)
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Uses of 'Namaste' at My Local Yoga Studio

“Namaste, everybody. ‘Namaste’ is a Sanskrit word that means ‘The divine in me recognizes the divine in you.’ ” —A benediction, delivered by yoga instructors at the end of practice. (...)

* * * 

Greetings, yogis! This e-mail is to inform you that in order to meet rising costs we will be raising our fee to $35 per class at the beginning of July. As a gentle reminder, we will continue to enforce our no-show and tardy policies. Yogis who fail to arrive at least five minutes prior to class will not be admitted and will be charged the full class fee. Cancellations must be made at least twenty-four hours in advance. Yogis cancelling less than twenty-four hours in advance will be charged the full class fee plus a five-dollar service charge. Yogis who fail to show up for a reserved class without making any cancellation will be charged the full class fee plus a ten-dollar service charge. Arriving more than five minutes late for a class will be counted as a no-show without a cancellation. Please let us know if you have any questions. Happy practice! Namaste! (...)

* * * 

Instructor: Let’s take a lotus or a half lotus or whatever is comfortable for you. Press your hands together at your heart center. Really plug those sit bones into the earth. And when you feel really centered you might turn to your neighbor and extend to them some of that energy from the heart center by offering them a Namaste. “Namaste” is a Sanskrit word that means “the divine in me recognizes the divine in you.” And when we offer our neighbor the Namaste we’re able to meet them in a place of peace that is free of ego. Namaste.
Male yogi: Namaste.
Female yogi: Namaste.
Male yogi: Namaste. What’s your name?
Female yogi: Natalie.
Male yogi: Namaste? Your name is Namaste? That’s crazy!
Female yogi: No, it’s Natalie.
Male yogi: Oh, wow. I totally thought you said Namaste. That would have been hilarious. But Natalie’s cool. What are you doing later, Natalie?
Female yogi: Probably going home.
Male yogi: No, don’t go home. You should come hang out with me.
Female yogi: Um, I don’t think I can.
Male yogi: That’s not true. You just said you were just going home. Come to my place. We can practice our headstands.
Female yogi: Yeah, I don’t think so. Sorry.
Male yogi: Come on. Why don’t you like me? I’ll make you a smoothie.
Female yogi: I think we need to be quiet now.
Male yogi: Alright. That’s fine, Natalie. Don’t you even want to know my name?
Female yogi: Fine, what’s your name?
Male yogi: Namaste.
Female yogi: What?
Male yogi: Just kidding. It’s Cody.

by Andrea Denhoed, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Bendik Kaltenborn.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. Photo by Greg Williams
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The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age

Interest in using the internet to slash the price of higher education is being driven in part by hope for new methods of teaching, but also by frustration with the existing system. The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.

In the first half of the 20th century, higher education was a luxury and a rarity in the U.S. Only 5% or so of adults, overwhelmingly drawn from well-off families, had attended college. That changed with the end of WWII. Waves of discharged soldiers subsidized by the GI Bill, joined by the children of the expanding middle class, wanted or needed a college degree. From 1945 to 1975, the number of undergraduates increased five-fold, and graduate students nine-fold. PhDs graduating one year got jobs teaching the ever-larger cohort of freshman arriving the next.

This growth was enthusiastically subsidized. Between 1960 and 1975, states more than doubled their rate of appropriations for higher education, from four dollars per thousand in state revenue to ten. Post-secondary education extended its previous mission—liberal arts education for elites—to include both more basic research from faculty and more job-specific training for students. Federal research grants quadrupled; at the same time, a Bachelor’s degree became an entry-level certificate for an increasing number of jobs.

This expansion created tensions among the goals of open-ended exploration, training for the workplace, and research, but these tensions were masked by new income. Decades of rising revenue meant we could simultaneously become the research arm of government and industry, the training ground for a rapidly professionalizing workforce, and the preservers of the liberal arts tradition. Even better, we could do all of this while increasing faculty ranks and reducing the time senior professors spent in the classroom. This was the Golden Age of American academia.

As long as the income was incoming, we were happy to trade funding our institutions with our money (tuition and endowment) for funding it with other people’s money (loans and grants.) And so long as college remained a source of cheap and effective job credentials, our new sources of support—students with loans, governments with research agendas—were happy to let us regard ourselves as priests instead of service workers.

Then the 1970s happened. The Vietnam war ended, removing “not getting shot at” as a reason to enroll. The draft ended too, reducing the ranks of future GIs, while the GI bill was altered to shift new costs onto former soldiers. During the oil shock and subsequent recession, demand for education shrank for the first time since 1945, and states began persistently reducing the proportion of tax dollars going to higher education, eventually cutting the previous increase in half. Rising costs and falling subsidies have driven average tuition up over 1000% since the 1970s.

Golden Age economics ended. Golden Age assumptions did not. For 30 wonderful years, we had been unusually flush, and we got used to it, re-designing our institutions to assume unending increases in subsidized demand. This did not happen. The year it started not happening was 1975. Every year since, we tweaked our finances, hiking tuition a bit, taking in a few more students, making large lectures a little larger, hiring a few more adjuncts.

Each of these changes looked small and reversible at the time. Over the decades, though, we’ve behaved like an embezzler who starts by taking only what he means to replace, but ends up extracting so much that embezzlement becomes the system. There is no longer enough income to support a full-time faculty and provide students a reasonably priced education of acceptable quality at most colleges or universities in this country.

Our current difficulties are not the result of current problems. They are the bill coming due for 40 years of trying to preserve a set of practices that have outlived the economics that made them possible.

by Clay Shirky |  Read more:

Image: via:

The Great Seattle Pizza Smackdown

[ed. I don't usually do product endorsements, and I'll admit, I've never tried Serious Pie, but I have tried Flying Squirrel and it's the best pizza I've ever had in the state of Washington (not to mention the hot green olive appetizer!)]

Get a pizzaiolo talking about his craft and you’re going to get an earful about correct proofing times and proper firing temps. Some are so bound to the strictures of their tradition they even get their pies certified (see New World Neapolitan ).

Then there are those who favor a more innovative approach. “We went in with no preconceptions besides making really good pizza,” recalls Eric Tanaka, who as executive chef and partner at Tom Douglas Restaurants was one of the visionaries consulted when Douglas decided to open Serious Pie in 2007.

“For four months we drove our baker insane,” Tanaka chuckles. Tanaka and Douglas asked Dahlia Bakery’s Gwen LeBlanc to come up with a more breadlike pizza crust than they were seeing around town; she produced three versions and the chefs nixed them all. “We wanted crispier, with a little bit of crumb to it,” he explains. So she lightened the dough with a softer flour. Too cakey. She tossed in semolina for texture and wound up with too gritty a crunch.

They went back to the original three—and through trial and error (“and a lot of Gwen shouting at us to get our act together!”) they discovered that the meaningful variable was fermentation. Too little, and the dough would lose flavor; too much, and it would smell too yeasty. The formula had to change whenever the weather did. “Crust is much more art than science,” Tanaka says.

They tinkered with their huge 1,000—degree Wood Stone oven, finally settling on six minutes at 650 degrees, with potatoes going on at the beginning, cheese in the last two minutes (“scorched cheese equals greasy pizza,” says Tanaka), and lighter charcuterie closer to the end. They made investigative pilgrimages to the country’s best pizzerias, from Oakland’s Pizzaiolo (“where we learned to finish pies with salt,”) to the legendary Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix.

Serious Pie, the stylishly dim and perpetually packed little joint downtown, is Seattle’s Pizzeria Bianco. All that bakery back-and-forth shows: Crusts are golden and toothsome, chewy within and crispy without, burnished with delectable bits of char. On top go A-list ingredients dictated by flavor and seasonality rather than tradition—hence our category name, the Seattle-style pie. One favorite is shingled with thin-sliced Yukon Golds, fragrant with rosemary and Pecorino Romano; another is dotted with sweet fennel sausage and cherry bomb peppers. Much attention is paid to cheese—which Douglas’s chefs intended to make themselves but learned on about their fourth slammed hour of their first slammed day that would be improbable at best. Like all toppings here, purslane to chanterelles to delicata squash, cheeses are ferociously seasonal—perhaps an Italian truffle variant, perhaps a tart sheep’s milk. The result is simply a masterpiece.

That fiercely local identity marks South End newcomer Flying Squirrel as a Seattle-style innovator too, crafting its own exuberant combos from mostly organic toppings. One pie features local asparagus, goat cheese, and pine nuts; another—the Washington—stars ham from local charcuterie Zoe’s Meats, with caramelized onions and Granny Smiths. Owner Bill Coury is as irreverent about the rules as Douglas, claiming that he wasn’t setting out to be authentically anything; he just wanted to make a classic American “everybody pizza” with the best-tasting stuff on top. And—judging from the crowds of hipsters and families that throng the friendly, Mexican coke–and–Olympia Beer sort of Seward Park storefront every night—that he has done.

BOTTOM LINE: Flying Squirrel offers pristine toppings on a bumpy landscape of highly flavorful crust, which nevertheless lacks the moisture and chewy satisfaction of Serious Pie’s serious triumph.

by Calise Cardenas, Christopher Werner, Jessica Voelker, Kathryn Robinson, Laura Cassidy, Matthew Halverson | Read more:

Image : Lindsay Borden